Thread by @houshuang

Up early on a Sunday to read for my book club on Sapiens📒, enjoying the calm. Asking myself some qs ahead of reading to prime myself, keeping track of when I read, looking up some relevant info in Wikipedia, and adding an SRS to keep track of it.

I know a lot of people are critical of this book, and I found a bunch of links that I'm also looking forward to going through. One thing that we discussed a lot around the first section is how the cognitive revolution/upper paleolithic transition actually happened.

Harari seems to suggest "we don't know but probably a random brain mutation". Vervaeke suggests we developed psycho-technologies, possibly through shamans, related to existential thread ([[Toba catastrophe]])

Replied to the wrong tweet: Active reading with Roam

https://twitter.com/houshuang/status/1335480106496692225

Really neat how I can use Ctrl+Shift+9 to quickly add content to another block on the page, without leaving my current location. Would be neat if it were possible to use this interface to also jump to another location (not just add/insert block ref).

Scattering spaced repetition questions throughout the text, usually block reffing or embedding answer. Can easily pull them out to see all questions for the whole text. And they're waiting for me on tomorrow's daily, together with older SRS questions.

There is a difference between studying for an exam and studying for the next ten years - I choose what to focus on. But I really like the idea of remembering key people, and years, for when I read other sources, but also to bring it up in conversations. Or for linking fluency...

If I can take notes and say, this reminds me of [[James J. Gibson]], much faster than trying to find who that person was who did that thing. Also believe brain is great at pattern matching - makes connections between things that links and tags cannot. Need both notes and memory.